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The rapid development of artificial intelligence over the next 20 years will completely change the landscape in which businesses operate. Recent innovations in AI have allowed data scientists to produce tools that can have a genuine disruptive impact on traditional business models across a range of sectors.

A recent study published by global management consulting firm Accenture revealed that 87% of businesses believe that machine learning will have a significant impact on their respective industries within the next 3 years. It’s easy to see why adoption of the technology is seen to be critical to growth by executives. The potential is enormous.

Big Data

A vast amount of data is accessible in today’s technology-laden landscape, but how to best use this data to gain qualitative insights about your business? One of the initial challenges management faces is how to streamline the collection of good quality data between departments.

Integration of collection strategies between CRM, ERP and CRP systems is vital to providing a strong initial data pool to work with. Once this has been gathered businesses have the foundation for some serious investigative scrutiny.

Terabytes of data are not easy to sort and sift through, however. and the salaries required to hire capable analysts to do this is a barrier to genuinely insightful analysis. The use of machine learning is the only efficient way to aggregate this data.

Corporate management simply set the scope and the objectives of the project whilst letting the AI take care of the semantics. Looking to the future it is easy to see why those who are resistive to the advancements in data science could be left behind.

Emotional Intelligence

It is not just the obvious benefits of being able to efficiently analyse fast swathes of data that is the siren call of AI. Huge progress is being made on the emotional intelligence of machines, it was recently reported that Google passed the much-lauded Turing test with flying colours, if machines can convincingly fool humans into thinking they’re human, the implications for business are massive.

We stand at the brink of a precipice; the ability to completely automate the customer service function of big business almost within reach. Perfect customer service every time, no hold times or call ques in call centres, chatbots that never go off script, the cost savings alone would run into billions if even a quarter of the FTSE 100 adopted this kind of technology in their back office.

Invest in Data Science

Any corporate IT strategists worth his salt should already have put into place comprehensive data science strategies. It is important, nevertheless, to be vigilant in the face of what is a rapidly changing landscape.

A lack of clear prepackaged solutions in the marketplace at the moment means that buying wholesale artificial intelligence packages is a difficult proposition so a more effective use of resources would be in data collection and preparation.